The Hotline that's now lukewarm

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Amy Walter, Chuck Todd and Norah O'Donnell are just three of The Hotline's many high-profile alumni.
Composite image by POLITICO

When political consultant Doug Bailey founded it in 1987, there was nothing like it. A full decade before most people had even heard the word blog, it was doing much of the work of one, aggregating political news from local dailies around the country and sending it through the CompuServ online modem service.

“The Hotline was in some ways the first aggregator, before aggregating was cool,” said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. “It wasn’t a new idea. The Defense Department had something called The Early Bird for a decade, and everyone in government has a news summary provided by aides so they don’t have to read through the newspapers.

“But what The Hotline did was, they had the idea that a new technology made it possible to do a news summary and distribute it by fax. Here we are almost a quarter century later, and that’s become the soul of a whole new information revolution.”

The technology gave it an edge over other clipping services, although the 30-page document took about 25 minutes to download using a phone line. Granular data about polling and a rundown of David Letterman’s previous night’s Top 10 list rounded out a frothy mix of entertainingly presented campaign-focused news that proved addictive.

Political campaigns, lobbyists and congressional offices subscribed because they had to.

"It was the kind of thing that people felt like they needed to read before they went out for lunch or to a cocktail party,” said Vaughn Ververs, who worked at The Hotline from 1992 to 1995 and again from 1998 to 2005, before leaving for CBS News.

But the interest often went far beyond professional duty. The two words that come up most often to describe what Hotline means to political junkies are “the bible” and “crack.”

Ingeniously, the crack was paid for by the addicts’ bosses, in the form of group subscriptions, which today range from about $9,000 for 10 users to $15,000 for a whole office. The high price meant that even if only 500 subscriptions were sold, The Hotline was still profitable. National Journal bought it in 1996, and it soon, by many accounts, became the most profitable arm of the group. The next year, Times Mirror sold the whole National Journal Group to Bradley.

During these years, to work at The Hotline was to be a kind of rock star in D.C. media circles.

“I remember reporters coming up, pleading with me to get the quote of the day, or to make sure their stories got in there,” Mortman said.

Alumni of The Hotline went on to some of the best jobs in political journalism. Chuck Todd, who started working there in 1992, served as editor-in-chief for six years, then left to become political director of NBC News and its chief White House correspondent.

“The Hotline is the crime beat of politics,” Todd said. “In the same way, that if you want to be a reporter, you start on the crime beat, the cops beat, being at The Hotline is a way to learn about covering Washington politics from the ground up.”

His on-air colleague, MSNBC’s Norah O’Donnell, is another Hotline alumna, as is NPR political editor Ken Rudin. And, of course, it goes without saying: you can’t swing a cat at POLITICO without hitting a Hotline alum: Danielle Jones, Jonathan Martin, Shira Toeplitz and Katherine Lehr all used to work there.

But as the Internet grew, the thing that The Hotline did so well – aggregation, analysis and witty headlines – became less and less special.

One of the first contenders for The Hotline’s throne was ABC’s “The Note,” started by Mark Halperin in 2002, which was called the “Skull and Bones of the political class” in a 2004 New Yorker profile. There were soon many others, including Real Clear Politics, Talking Points Memo and eventually, in 2007, POLITICO.

In an early bid to regain some of that ground, Todd and Marc Ambinder, now at the Atlantic, launched the publication’s first blog, On Call, in 2005.

Now our loving, caring biased media get emails, twitters and tweets zipped to their Iphone which is sold at a profit without a subsidy. But our biased media would never notice something as simple and basic as that.

Instead obama tweeted them to pound on his visit to UAW Motors, (formerly GM) and tell us all how good his speech prepared by his teleprompter was. And, our media complied! They are like putty in the hands of a sculptor.

How do we get a relatively unbiased media without giving up on Print and TV altogether?

For one, I am tired of being propagandized with fudged and patently false adjectives and adverbs.

Being a Democrat is becoming more and more disgusting each and every day. We seem to have a party of misfits, spenders, wasters, porkers an wanna be ex-cons.

Novemeber, 2010 is looking and smelling better each and every day I read about the criminal element running the Democrat party.

I guess in the parallel universe of Politico this is important - who belonged to what list feed and how technology has changed? Duh. I think Chuck Todd is the biggest doof on any news channel so I'm not sure any technology would help him.

I had to laugh at the above post. I just said to my husband the media jumped the shark with the Obama campaign and election and he asked me what the He*L "jump the shark means". He didn't see much TV as a kid.

OUR FOURTH ESTATE HAS BECOME A SLUM RUN BY VALERIE JARRET AND TONY REZKO AND FRIENDS. ONLY THE HARD CORE PROGRESSIVES, OR PEOPLE ON THE GOVERNMENT DOLE WOULD REALLY LISTEN TO WHAT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA IS SAYING.

These three are all Obummer supporters and will always try and spin any news they get to the Democrats advantage. How stupid do they think we are ? Lets just hope that Chuck Todd goes with Obummer in 2012. They deserve each other. This Country will see big changes in November. The current bunch of Legislators we have in Washington have failed this Country miserably and they will all get a message in November, " GOOD-BYE" The people are going to take their Country back. This will be "CHANGE" you can believe in ! CAN'T WAIT !!!

All these journalists who think they are the smartest guys in the room couldn't see this coming? Really.

Hogwash, they don't have any edge and they are the last ones to catch on. All the social networking has done is allow they to plot and plan the news the way they want it. It takes a real hard headed fighter to get the real news and none of these pantywaists have the gits for it. It's more important for them to be liked. If they reported the truth they would have to have courage to stand alone. They don't have it.

"Hi Chuck. This is Rahm. Sorry I missed you. Listen, Barack is going on the road to spin some s--t about his economic success. You know what to do. Oh, and can you spread the word to get everyone else there on board?. Thanks, buddy. You're the best."

For teabaggers and ****servative nut jobs, anything short of, "today, the marxist sociaist usurper in the White House took another step toward destroying the nation that Jesus himself founded" is "liberal bias". What a bunch of bul - what unintelligent fool would listen to even a single word of what a ****servative says? Just go away and watch and cry as you get crushed in election after election after election